BackTalk; Why Mixing With Men Matters

By DIANA NYAD

Published: May 18, 2003

When you are far and away the best male athlete in your sport, what star remains for you to reach for? Sports pundits have been lamenting Tiger Woods's dearth of valid competition ever since he won his first Masters. If Phil Mickelson, Ernie Els and Vijay Singh cannot rise to the Tiger Challenge, then Woods isn't pushed to set his sights higher.

Bill Tilden's one-sided tennis matches of the 1920's were legendary in their unsportsmanlike conduct, in that he would let the match slide to being down a set, 0-5 and all the way to love-40 in order to create some dramatic tension. He would then work himself back up, point by point, to victory. Tilden and tennis fans alike were desperate for a player who could hold a racket to his genius. He was always looking down instead of up.

Annika Sorenstam is the Bill Tilden of her sport. Each year she accomplishes what even elite players would consider career-long achievements. But unlike a male phenom, a female superstar has another ladder to climb. Sorenstam's entry into the PGA Tour's Colonial tournament this week is no gimmick. This is not Billie Jean King-Bobby Riggs theater.

Sorenstam is a self-effacing, dignified, understated Swedish champion out of the Bjorn Borg mold. This woman is the center of the show, but she's no showwoman. She's teeing it up with the men in Fort Worth this week to find just where the ceiling stops at the top of that beautiful swing of hers.

Top female athletes automatically understand and accept that they are not as powerful as top male athletes, just as featherweight boxers understand and accept that they are not as powerful as heavyweights. In sports in which brute strength and related explosive speed are the main factors, there's no logic to having women compete against men.

Comparing the sexes is a moot exercise. It would be beyond absurd, for example, to call Serena Williams weak or inferior because she does not compete against and beat the top men in tennis. But if her Grand Slam streak goes on unchallenged much longer, and as long as her serve is timed at speeds comparable to that of the top men, more than 120 miles an hour, she may one day also ask if she can play with the boys.

Every now and then an exceptionally gifted female athlete comes along, so exceptional that she is able to mix with the best men.

In the reverse situation, there are men who have not been quite champion caliber in their sports who have asked to compete with the top women. A 31-year-old Arizona golfer, Brian Kontak, is looking into legal action to enter this year's United States Women's Open. It may seem a double standard, but the women's rules grant entry only to ''professionals and amateur golfers who were female at birth.''

If a man isn't good enough to compete with the top men of his sport, he must compete at a lower level of the men's game. To use the boxing analogy again, for him to compete with women would be like allowing an inferior heavyweight to get in the ring with featherweights, when he has too many potential advantages.

I remember when the transsexual Renee Richards started playing on the women's tennis tour in the late 1970's. As Richard Raskind, Richards had been an accomplished but not world-class men's player. Once Richards had sex-change surgery, she was not only past her prime in years, but the hormonal changes had also slowed her down, and she looked and felt like a woman. Still, a number of the female pros at the time resisted playing against a woman who still had the height and other skeletal advantages of being born male. In the end, Renee Richards was accepted onto the women's tour, but, had she been in her early 20's instead of her 40's and had a chance to win major championships, I wonder what her opponents would have said.

Now there are sports to which gender is not at all germane, like auto racing and yachting and dog-sled racing, to name a few. Games like pool and billiards and poker and chess and bowling don't call on gender-specific attributes. These activities demand respective genetic skills, like quick reflexes and depth perception and eye-hand accuracy, not to mention mental focus and cool under pressure -- none of which are sex-specific.

A woman has steered a thoroughbred through traffic into a Triple Crown race's winner's circle (Julie Krone aboard Colonial Affair in the 1993 Belmont Stakes). And as our society evolves further and female athletes grow past this infancy stage of acceptance, development and sponsorship in historically men-only endeavors, we will no doubt witness female champions at the Indy 500, the Kentucky Derby and the America's Cup. All of this will come to pass in my lifetime.

When I used to stand on a beach before a long-distance swimming race of more than 50 miles, about to compete against several hundred men and a handful of women, I was supremely confident that I had as good a chance as any of them to win. Actually, a better chance than most.

Yet in the late 1970's, when Andy Kaufman challenged me to a wrestling match on ''Saturday Night Live'' for $25,000, I refused. That was show biz, not sport. As one of the strongest, certainly fittest, women in the world at that time, I recognized that I wouldn't come close to outwrestling a nonathletic man who was 5 inches taller and outweighed me by some 40 pounds.

Wrestling is all about brute strength and related explosive speed. It's perhaps the ultimate of sex-differentiated sports, yet there have been instances where girls wrestled boys in high school matches. Golf, in this regard, lies somewhere between wrestling and long-distance swimming. Golf asks a wide variety of talents of its players. There's finesse; accuracy; control of spins and fades; club selection; a feel for the wind, for the greens and for the slopes. And, yes, the need for power off the tees and on long fairway shots is undeniable. A woman is obviously at a disadvantage at the end of the day.

Let's say power counts as a 28 percent factor in an 18-hole round. Logic would dictate, then, that being a woman would be about a 28 percent disadvantage. That's why women and men play on separate tours. It is as it should be. And that is why it is highly unlikely that Annika Sorenstam will leave the L.P.G.A. Tour permanently and make her mark on the longer courses of PGA Tour events.

Sorenstam's playing in the Colonial is not the story of a woman trying to beat men at a game in which men are genetically dominant. It is the story of a marvelously gifted athlete flexing her champion's spirit to find out just how great she can be. Surely, we (women and men alike, even Vijay Singh) can root for this special athlete this week as she tees it up shoulder to shoulder with the best players on the planet. Why shouldn't Sorenstam have the chance to reach for her highest star?

Photo: Tiger Woods and Annika Sorenstam, the world's best male and female golfers, were partners for the Battle at Bighorn in 2001. (Associated Press)

Diana Nyad holds the record for the longest ocean swim, for men and women, 102.5 miles from the Bahamas to Florida in 1979.